Gottfried Helnwein's life and art is a hybrid of trad and neo-Gothic with a touch of Hollywood. His Tipperary castle provides the perfect Gallery

Gottfried Helnwein with his wife Renate and Grandchildren Solas, Croi and Eala in the library in Gurteen Castle

2016

Nineteen years ago Gottfried Helnwein
asked his wife Renate to find him a castle. They were living on
Parliament Street in Dublin’s Temple Bar, searching for an Irish base.
“She’s found two. She’s very good at finding things,” he says. “One was
in Connemara, then this.”

Helnwein is one of the world’s famous and also controversial artists.
Gifted with an extraordinary ability, his subjects are frequently
children, although his themes hover uncomfortably around their absolute
innocence and the omnipresent awfulness of the worst aspects of the
adult world.

The resulting paintings are ethereally beautiful and subtly disturbing.
They are also timeless; so, with its grey stone turrets and battlements,
high neo-Gothic windows and shroudings of clinging creeper, Helnwein’s
Tipperary castle seems the ideal backdrop for his work.

Despite the pleasantness of the day, we’re sitting by a fire in the
castle’s library, a rich, red book-lined room, its walls hung with
portraits of the castle’s previous occupants and ancestors. There is
very good coffee in a pretty floral cup, and millet muffins.

“There’s no sugar, they’re like medicine. You can eat them without
sinning,” he laughs. Helnwein has an infectious laugh and a surprisingly
attractive smile – surprising because, dressed in his trademark black,
with bandana, sunglasses and silver skull jewellery, one might expect
some sense of aggression.

The opposite is true; he is possibly shy, definitely fiercely
intelligent and utterly passionate about art, architecture, politics,
family and the restoration of Gurteen Castle. “We had to do a lot, but
90 per cent you don’t see,” he says, his native Austrian accent
inflecting his words lending them a misleadingly categorical nature.

The family chose Gurteen over Co Galway for what, I
discover, are typically counter-intuitive reasons. In Connemara, “there
is something special that’s impossible to describe. When I was walking
there I felt a happiness that was completely unexplainable.”

So how come Tipperary? “I wanted to be happy, but too
happy? Anyway, the ceilings here are higher, there’s more space and it
was unrestored, so I could develop it to my taste.”

The restoration has actually been incredibly sensitive and in the
library it’s difficult to imagine that much has changed. Its current
incarnation – there were two previous castles on the site – was built in
1866 for Count Edmund de la Poer, private chamberlain to Pope Pius X.

Unexpectedly bright

Elsewhere, it is unexpectedly bright, the arched
hallway opening up to a doubleheight staircase, lit from above by
skylights. A pair of reception rooms have been painted in light shades
with sanded floorboards and are empty of furniture, playing host, no
doubt, to some of the parties Helnwein is tactfully reticent about, but
which have included the wedding reception for his friend Marilyn Manson to burlesque performer Dita von Teese.

Renate is also fond of inviting local musicians back for sessions and I
can imagine the house rocking into the night in a brilliant hybrid of
trad, neo-Gothic and a sprinkling of Hollywood.

There are Helnwein touches everywhere. Alongside his huge and
disconcertingly lifelike photorealistic paintings, he has also regilded
the fireplace in the library and turned his hand to distressing the
timbers that form the canopy above the range, in the classically cosy
country kitchen. He likes this work because, unlike painting, you know
when it’s finished. And he clearly loves the house.

Outside, the Hollywood impression is strengthened by tall palm trees on
the lawns, which run down to an artificial lake, along with a suitably
spooky and beguilingly beautiful arboretum, complete with fern fringed
stone steps to nowhere.

“I need to line it with clay,” he says of the lake.
“I research all the time. I know how to make a lake now, with the old
techniques.”

So if the art doesn’t work out, you could become a
house restorer? I joke, because his international reputation is so
strong (he’s currently working towards an exhibition at San Francisco’s
Modernism Gallery in September), this eventuality is extremely unlikely.
He takes me seriously for a split second, before agreeing that he
could, but that for now he’s lucky enough to do both.

“I’m often thinking, why was every building up to the 20th century
beautiful? Little cottages, a farmhouse, they all look beautiful. Today,
most of the contemporary, modern architecture I find horrible.”

Timeless aesthetic

Does that, I wonder, tie into the
timeless aesthetic of his own work which, despite contemporary
references, could sit comfortably alongside master works from art
history?

“I think it’s an objective thing. Modern architecture can’t age. After
10 years you can’t look at it. It wears out so easily. There’s a big
crisis when it comes to aesthetics. Each building is completely
different, so if you make a city, you think you’re in Crazytown.”

Does that reflect a fracturing in how we live, how we think these days?
“Yes, art always does that, but architecture is a mirror of the soul, of
the condition people are in.”

Walking back, plastic toys are clustered under a tree
beside the vegetable garden. Three of the Helnwein’s four children live
at the castle, plus three grandchildren: Croí (10), Éala (5) and Solas
(2).

They are, as Helnwein says, “the joy of my life” and
regular models for his work, although, he tells me, Éala doesn’t like to
sit still: “She’s a hurricane.”

He adds: “What I like about these country houses, from these times, is
each has a personality. Even when they’re located in a certain style,
each one is completely different. For me this has an odd, funny
personality. It’s a little stubborn, a little weird, but in a nice way.”

Nativity scene Back inside, the nicely weird house is the perfect
backdrop for his work. It is hung like an incredible site- specific
exhibition. There is the haunting Epiphany, a beautiful
nativity scene, of the serene Madonna presenting her child to the Wise
Men, except these men are dressed in Nazi uniforms and the baby has a
passing resemblance to Hitler.

Many of Helnwein’s themes come from his experiences growing up in post- war Austria.
He was born in 1948, a time that he describes as horrible, dark,
carrying “the smell of death”. He has also cited the influence of
imagery from the Catholic church.

“The first pictures I saw depicted pain,” he has
said, while also remarking, in answer to a question about the
controversies that surround his own work, that it seems okay to watch TV
and movies where children are killed, or kill, but that art seems to
evoke far more powerful reactions.

In 1979, on reading an article in which Dr Heinrich
Gross, then Austria’s top court psychiatrist, admitted to killing
children “humanely” during the war by poisoning their food, Helnwein
painted Life Not Worth Living, an image of a little girl collapsed, either asleep or dead, into a bowl of soup.

He published it in an Austrian magazine, sparking a
debate that led to Gross appearing in court, ultimately being judged
mentally unfit to be tried.

Landscape paintings Ireland’s influence is also there, in a series of
extraordinary landscape paintings, epic canvases steeped in green and so
invitingly real you could almost step into them. He is working on
another, but he’s not ready to show it yet.

Painting, he says “starts with an emotional feeling, all intuition, not
so much thinking or planning. Then I look for it and suddenly there’s an
image. When I look at my work, usually I feel, I don’t know, it’s not
enough. So you have to try again. You have a vision and you can never
get there. You can only try to approach it.”

Back in the library, I ask him about some skulls on a bookcase. They
came from a castle he used to own in Germany. Does he think about death?
“It’s important to be aware of it, because you live your life a little
bit different. You have a certain time, a few years. I always have the
idea there’s so much more to do and time is running out.”

Renate, who is extremely beautiful, with long auburn hair and a smile
that seems to invite you to be complicit in the next adventure, walks me
out to the car, just as Solas appears in a Superman suit.

It is the perfect image to leave with: fantasy and reality in one place
and a family who have made their own world, so that Helnwein can have
the space to make his art, which just might change the way we see ours.